Split-level houses built in the 1970s tend to share a structural signature: a load-bearing wall running the length of the plan, separating a formal living room from a galley kitchen, with a masonry chimney anchoring the middle. That was exactly the layout here, and it's exactly what had to go to get the open kitchen-to-living sequence the family actually wanted.

Removing the central wall meant installing a flush structural steel beam disguised inside a dropped bulkhead, sized by the engineer to carry the loads from both the upper floor and the roof above. The old chimney, no longer needed since the house was converting to a heat pump, came out entirely, freeing up nearly forty square feet of usable floor area in the new kitchen.

The house had good bones and a bad plan. We kept the bones and threw out almost everything else.

Underneath the existing subfloor, the original joists turned out to be in excellent shape — full-dimension 2x10 lumber, oversized by modern code standards — which meant the renovation could add a heavier engineered stone countertop and a larger island without any structural reinforcement below.

The split-level's stepped floor plan, which could have felt like a compromise, became the organizing device for the new open plan instead: the sunken living room stayed sunken, now read as a deliberate lounge pit rather than an awkward level change, with a wide step doubling as informal seating at parties.

Exterior walls and the roof structure were untouched, which kept the renovation's embodied-carbon footprint far lower than a teardown-rebuild would have been, and let the project finish in five months rather than the fourteen a full rebuild would have required.